Sailer on Ghostbusters: Paul Feig, Honorary Non–Straight White Male

Feig doubles down on the pseudo-physics bafflegab in the original without considering that modern women prefer the life sciences. While women have won six Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine in this century, no woman has won a physics Nobel since 1963.

Why? Physics is the death science. When Robert Oppenheimer invented the atomic bomb, he thought to himself, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Not many females have ever felt that sounded like an awesome reason to become a physicist. But trust me, a lot of males have. (…)

Leslie Jones, the giant black lady from Saturday Night Live whose main shtick is her good-natured joking about being a black giantess (she’s almost a foot taller than comedian Kevin Hart), is comparable to Ernie Hudson in the role of the Vaguely Defined Black Worker. (Aykroyd had intended the role for Eddie Murphy, thus figuring there was no point in putting much planning into the character because Murphy would no doubt improvise something more brilliant than the writers could come up with. But then Murphy got Beverly Hills Cop instead of Sylvester Stallone and couldn’t make Ghostbusters.)

Beside Murray’s superlative performance and Parker’s song, the old Ghostbusters was powered by its Reagan-era pro-business attitude (recall that the EPA bureaucrat is the human bad guy). After all the antibusiness movies of the 1970s, this tech start-up allegory was galvanizing at the time.